A Pivotal Moment.

It had never happened to him before. He stood in shock looking at the burnt out shell of what once had been his lovely vintage car. ‘Bloody kids’ he thought, ‘Bored most probably, nothing better to do, little bastards!’.

‘Hadn’t you better ring the police?’ the ever sensible voice of his erstwhile girlfriend came from behind him. ‘Damn it!’ he mused ‘It was her fault he’d parked here in the first place’.

Four days previously he’d reluctantly left his lovely old vintage Merc here at this Car Pool car park next to Junction 23 of the A29 motorway near a place called Willemstad.
Having removed anything worth stealing and securing the car, he’d jumped into his girlfriends brand new Jaguar and vowed not to think about the treasured Merc until his return.

She had been supposed to be meeting him at his house, in which case he could have left the Merc safely on the drive at home. Instead she didn’t arrive at the predicted time, nor had she arrived half an hour later when he decided to ring her and find out where she was.

‘Hello’

‘Hello it’s me. Where are you? You must’ve got off the ferry a couple of hours ago.’

‘Er yeah I did, I’ve been following the Sat Nav and the traffic’s been really bad, it’s choc-a-block here’

‘Oh OK. I didn’t realize it was THAT bad. So, where are you now?’

‘Er….the A29’

‘What! Are you sure?’

‘That’s what it say’s on the sign……near a place called Willemstad’

‘But that’s miles away….down south! You are meant to be traveling north!’

‘Oh shit……I thought it was taking longer than usual. I think the Sat Nav’s playing up then’

‘Didn’t you realize the sun was on your right when it should have been on your left?’

‘No, but I thought it strange that I didn’t recognize any of these roads, I thought the Sat Nav was diverting me to avoid the traffic though’

‘Stupid bitch!’ he thought. ‘She’d traveled the journey from the ferry port to his houseboat at least ten times, twice when she’d driven herself.’

‘Do you want me to turn around then?’ she asked, snapping him back to the current dilemma.

‘No!’ he exclaimed ‘Stay exactly where you are, I’ll come and find you. I’ll be a couple of hours though, turn off at the next junction and park up!’

It was already gone 10pm when he eventually found her. They’d decided that it would be better to leave the Merc there at the Car Pool parking spot and travel on to France in the Jag. Now it was four days later, the sojourn in France lay behind them, and his nicely relaxed muscles were again beginning to tighten at the sight of his burnt out Merc being loaded onto the back of a tow truck from the local scrap dealer.

As if finding the car in that state wasn’t bad enough, the local police had told him he’d have to pay for the car to be scrapped and to get the debris cleared up too. He’d followed the tow truck back to the scrap yard to sign the necessary paperwork, and then persuaded his girlfriend to give him a lift to Schiphol Airport so that he could hire a car to get to his office the next day. She was worried that it might cause her to miss the ferry back to the UK, but was feeling guilty about the wrecked Merc too, so it didn’t take him long to persuade her to drop him at Schiphol. In any event she didn’t miss the ferry.

However, in retrospect, now that he thinks about it with the benefit of hindsight. It was definitely at that precise point that he decided the relationship between them was over. It was really the last in a long line of incidents where her general incompetence and ineptitude had caused him to lose something of value. Not always material value either, in this case it was certainly the sentimental value which mattered more to him anyway, but there was always something of worth involved.

It was the last straw as far as he was concerned, time to cut his losses and move on. His association with her was proving to be more destructive than it was fruitful and THAT was the key issue. 2006 lay ahead of him shimmering with promise, and from deep within he felt that, with a little focus in the right places, this really could be HIS year……